Laptop Buying Guide - Portability

This is the 2nd part of the  laptop buying guide which will be focusing on portability of a laptop.

Portability of a laptop depends on its size and weight. Majority of the laptop lovers are girls who love stylish /girly stuff. So when it comes to weight and size, most of them will prefer to get the thin and light / ultraportable type of laptop, as it looks the coolest and is easiest to carry. While smaller and thinner laptops do give the advantage of portability and cool outlook, they are comparatively more expensive than the midsize laptop, and might also having less features due to the size limitation. Generally, there are 5 categories of laptop in terms of portability: Ultraportable, Thin and Light, Midsize, and Desktop Replacement.


Ultraportable
This is the lightest and smallest among all categories. It's most suitable for people who need to travel with their laptop frequently. An ultraportable laptop will have the following characteristics:
- Thickness of less than 1 inch
- Weight equal or less than 4 pound
- Diagonal screen size of 14 inches or less
- Normally with slower and and lower voltage mobile processor
- Comparatively fewer numbers of connection ports
- Small touchpad and keyboard
- Starting price of $1,100
Available pink laptops in this category include: Sony VAIO Tz Series, LG E200/300, Clevo 12" series, Fujitsu LifeBook and Samsung Q40, Asus Eee PC.


Thin and Light
This is the intermediate between ultraportable and midsize laptop. It has more features, better performance but larger size compare with the ultraportable. Some people may prefer this category of laptop as they have better performance, and although the size is larger than the ultraportable, still easy to carry. The thin and light laptop has the following characteristics:
- Thickness of approximately 1 inch
- Weight between 4 to 6 pounds
- Diagonal screen size of 14 inches (approximately)
- Normally with midrange to fast dual core processors
- More connection ports than the ultraportable + optical drive
- Small touchpad and keyboard
- Starting price: $800
Available pink laptop in this category include: Sony VAIO CR series and Dell Inspiron 1420.

Midsize
This is the most common type of laptop. While the design of ultraportable and thin-and-light laptop are emphasizing on portability, and desktop replacement is design for high performance, the midsize laptop is not specialized in any of them. It's slightly larger and heavier than the thin-and-light laptop, and is not particularly suitable for travel. Most home users who do not need to travel a lot with their laptop will find this laptop suitable for them. The midsize laptop has the following characteristics:
- Thickness: > 1 inch
- Weight between 6 to 8 pounds
- Diagonal screen size of 14 to 15.4 inches
- Can have a wide range of processor, from the fast Core 2 Duo processors or Turion 64X2 to Slow/budget AMD Sempron or Intel Celeron
- Most connection ports + memory card reader, DVD burner
- Appearance is not as attractive as ultraportable / thin-and-light
- Starting price: $500
Available pink laptops in this category include: Sony VAIO FZ series, Dell Inspiron 1520 & 1525


Desktop replacement
This is the bulkiest but also with the best performance laptop. It can be carry for short distance, but is definitely not for long travel. As the name suggest, the desktop replacement is designed to have the performance and features that you can get from a desktop PC. With its high performance and complete set of features, the desktop replacement is most suitable for gamers and home / business users who use their laptops for high level digital video or mutimedia work. The desktop replacement laptop has the following characteristics:
- Thickness: > 1 inch
- Weight 7.5 pounds or more
- Diagonal screen size of 17 to 20 inches
- Fast dual core processor
- Most connection ports + memory card reader, two layer DVD burner
- Limited battery life it's not designed for mobility
- Starting price: $1000
Available pink laptops in this category include: Dell Inspiron 1720

Each categories have their good and bad. A few thing that you should be considering while buying a laptop: the frequency that you will be traveling with your laptop, the performance and features of the laptop that meets your requirement, and maybe the appearance of the laptop. This will help you to get yourself an ideal pink laptop.

Pink Laptop Buying Guide - Spec

While this guide is written specially for those who wish to buy a  color laptop, it's more on the few very basic aspects of the laptop as it's predicted that most pink laptop buyer are made up of girls who have no or very limited knowledge about laptop computer hardware stuff. If you are a tech savvy guy or girl who already have the basic knowledge for laptop computer hardware, this article might not be of your interest.
When buying a new laptop computer, you will find that there are many many technical terms of the hardware component which makes you totally lost. That's normal for an average user. This guide will give you some simple description about a few important components of your laptop computer. The first most important part of a laptop computer is the processor. It's the 'brain' of your pink laptop computer which gives it the ability to think, make all the complicated computation. As of today, these are the most common processors that are available on the market:

- Intel Core 2 Extreme
- Intel Core 2 Duo
- Intel Core Duo
- AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core
- AMD Turion 64 / Intel Core Solo / Intel Pentium M
- Mobile AMD Sempron / Intel Celeron M

Note that the list above start from the most high-end processor to the lowest end at the bottom. For avarage laptop user, the Intel Core Duo or AMD Turion 64X2 Dual Core is good enough for normal gaming, Internet surfing, and word processing task.

Then the next most important aspect of a laptop computer is the main memory or RAM (Random Access Memory). When you use your pink laptop to load up the operating system, and open up several application programs, all of them (the OS and the current running applications) will reside on the main memory. So imagine the RAM as a table, and the hard drive memory as the drawer. How many applications that your pink laptop is able to run simultaneously without degrading the performance will depends on whether the table is large enough to place all the applications on it. When the table is full, and you still want to place more stuff on it (running more applications simultaneously), some of them will need to be put into the drawer, and to be taken in and out from the drawer as the application runs. And this will cause performance degration. So more RAM, better performance. How much RAM should you get for your pink laptop will depend on what OS you are running. To run Windows XP or any earlier version of Windows, 512 MB is the minimum that you should get, while for for Windows Vista or Mac OS X, 1GB of RAM is the minimum requirement (2GB is recommended for optimal performance).

And finally the graphic card. If you are just using your laptop just for normal word processing, internet surfing and playing lower end 2D game, an onboard graphic card will be good enough. But if you want to use it for graphically demanding job, such as playing high-end 3D games,a faster graphic card that has its own memory is required. such graphic card will have it's own memory (32MB, 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB, 512MB) so it will not need to share the RAM of the CPU, and thus giving much better performance when it comes to games/applications that are graphically demanding. If you think you need a higher end of such graphic card, read the guide from notebookheck.

So, in terms of the laptop computer's spec, these are the at least three important components that should be paid attention to. While this guide is titled 'Pink Laptop Buying Guide', it actually applies to any other laptops, whether it's pink or not. It's just that those who are looking to buy a pink laptop will usually have less knowledge about the computer hardware stuff which this guide will give them some basic understanding of what they are getting besides the fancy pink laptop.